536
THE FOURTH WORLD
PART II
DOCUMENTS
RAPPORT INTERDISCIPLINAIRE NANTERRE,
11
JU IN 1968
N A NTE RRE
Henceforth social reality and the University's function in
relation to it shall be the object of permanent criticism and questioning.
To the limit of our possibilities, we will have to subvert the whole aca–
demic institution from the functions assigned to it by the ruling class and
by our deepest repressions, to make of it a place where we can elaborate
the means of a critical understanding and expression of reality. The return
to classes in 1968 at Nanterre will not be a return to normal, the normal
being cultural oppression. Om task is not simply to make the Faculty
Translator's Note:
The "May R evolution" in France was first of all, and
perhaps most lastingly, a revolution of the word. With the proliferation of
flamboyant tracts composed, mimeographed and distributed almost instan–
taneously, with the stark and beautiful posters of the
atelier populaire
of
Beaux-Arts, perhaps most of all with the graffiti that appeared on walls
everywhere to give voice to the individual's participation in the new order
of things, the students achieved a redistribution of the power of the word,
and of the word as power. They seized and exercised a language which
had belonged to the "others," to the forces of alienation, to the government,
to official sources of information, to propaganda and advertising, gave
it a new vitality and originality, and made it serve imagination in power.
When, in the occupied Faculties, the "paritary committees" - the
soviets of students and teachers - sat down to transform the movement of
revolt into the constitution of a new University, this revolution of the
word informed their efforts, d etermined content and style. The committee
reports were to be the first texts in a Cultural Revolution which would end
repression, in both the Marxist and Freudian senses. One of the most
remarkable of these reports was that produced by the "Interdisciplinary
Committee" of the Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences of Nanterre,
where the "movement" first began. Translated here is the general preamble,
which was followed by reports in the specific areas of "Culture and Critique,"
"Structure and Organization of the Faculty," "Form and Content of Teach–
ing." In default of acknowledgment to the report's anonymous authors,
may I at least express my thanks to Louis Marin, Assistant de Philosophie
at Nanterre and a member of the Committee, who gave me the document.
